Re: Nutrition / Linked data

For the moment, I've decided to KISS - model food name => energy content
broken down into fat, carbohydrates, protein; get the terms and
relationships / measurements right; and expand out later to food groups,
nutrients, and other detail.

At least that way I can get something published and build a few applications
ontop of it; and expand it out if there is interest.

Dan Brickley mentioned FAO's AGROVOC, but its not exactly the easiest
website to use and he suggests theres more happening behind the scenes than
on the public website; particular in the way of vocabularies and the like.

I also came across FAO's infoods content, which provides plain text
abbreviation definitions - a bit of a pain and a bit out of scope to deal
with.



>
>
> This is a subject that really allows the full potential of semantic
> technologies to be unleashed.
>
> I recommend you also look at the WHO, FAO, and European Union programs on
> agriculture, food and nutrition which deal specifically with application of
> semantic web technologies.
>
> Of these three you may want to look at the FAO first (Food and Agriculture
> Organization) of the UN first.
>
> Milton Ponson
> GSM: +297 747 8280
> Rainbow Warriors Core Foundation
> PO Box 1154, Oranjestad
> Aruba, Dutch Caribbean
> www.rainbowwarriors.net
> Project Paradigm: A structured approach to bringing the tools for
> sustainable development to all stakeholders worldwide
> www.projectparadigm.info
> NGO-Opensource: Creating ICT tools for NGOs worldwide for Project Paradigm
> www.ngo-opensource.org
> MetaPortal: providing online access to web sites and repositories of data
> and information for sustainable development
> www.metaportal.info
> SemanticWebSoftware, part of NGO-Opensource to enable SW technologies in
> the Metaportal project
> www.semanticwebsoftware.info
>
>
> --- On *Sat, 1/10/09, Daniel O'Connor <daniel.oconnor@gmail.com>* wrote:
>
> From: Daniel O'Connor <daniel.oconnor@gmail.com>
> Subject: Nutrition / Linked data
> To: public-lod@w3.org
> Date: Saturday, January 10, 2009, 10:14 AM
>
>
> Hey all,
> I'm Daniel O'Connor, a software engineer from Australia.
>
> At the moment I'm trying to get a lot of food nutrition data together from
> a whole bunch of different sources and create a bit of an ontology; publish
> it as RDF; and make sure its chock full of linked data goodness; and I could
> use your help, advice, pointers and encouragement.
>
> Use cases include things like shopping, diet / fitness applications,
> cooking, and much more.
>
>    - what did you eat today? -> hey, that's only 75% of your recommended
>    daily energy intake
>    - what is the approximate food energy in this recipe?
>    - tell me the fattiest food I'm eating and replace it with one with
>    more protein (but the same energy content)
>
>
> The data sources I've got on my list so far are:
>
>    - USDA's SR21 food nutrients data (public domain)
>    - Australia's NUTTAB 06 data (not so public domain)
>    - Canadia's CNF data (haven't delved into it in depth)
>
> The typical format provided is CSV, so I'm going through and mapping those
> CSV exports back into a RDBMS (php + mysql / pgsql / etc), then providing
> tools to generate RDF out, and publishing the static results.
>
>
> You can see (and get) the code from:
> http://freebase-owl.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/nutrition/
>
> and read a bit more about installing from:
>
> http://clockwerx.blogspot.com/2009/01/generating-nutritional-data-rdf-from.html
>
>
> and view samples of the output:
> USDA:
> http://lauken.com/doconnor/nutrition/usda/1006.rdf
>
> NUTTAB:
> http://lauken.com/doconnor/nutrition/nuttab/01A10027.rdf
>
> Ontology (draft!):
> http://www.lauken.com/doconnor/nutrition/0.1/schema.rdf
>
>
>
> There's a lot of work for me here, and if anyone here has knowledge or a
> helping hand, I'd love to hear from you, especially regarding the ones in
> bold.
>
>    - Resolve licensing agreements with Aust. government for rights to
>    reproduce data (in progress)
>    - Model Canadian data
>    - *Find or create a suitable ontology for Nutrition data* (I would have
>    expected some common terms from the bio-rdf community, but I don't have the
>    background to know what I'm looking for)
>    - Model the USDA, NUTTAB and Canadian extensions as appropriate
>    - Find or create (ick hope not) an ontology for measurements in
>    relation to typical nutrition measurements (again, there's no semantic web
>    concepts for milligrams, kilocalories, etc - not even in dbpedia. timbl did
>    some very high level concepts of what a Gram / etc is; but its not quite the
>    same)
>     - Find or create a list of terms used in nutrition data
>    (shorthand/abbreivations) - ie CBODF = "Carbohydrate by difference", but I
>    can't seem to find a good list of these outside of the USDA data itself.
>    - Find or create a *journal publications ontology* (dublincore might do
>    it though; or some other bibliographic ontology) - suggestions?
>    - Find or create *science terms ontology* (Paper, Subject, Experiment,
>    Samples, etc) - anyone?
>    - Create *owl:sameAs links to DBPedia* topics in some automated fashion
>    - this is tricky, because a lot of the data is written as "Cheese, blue" and
>    is much more granular than wikipedia articles about Cheese.
>    - Create *owl:sameAs links to Freebase* topics in some automated
>    fashion - ditto
>    - *Interlink Canadian, NUTTAB, USDA data* in some automated fashion -
>    similar - different naming schemes make using dc:title as a IFP a bit
>    annoying.
>    - Render full sets of RDF for each
>    - Publish these somewhere - http://lauken.com/doconnor/ is not suitable
>    for anything more than a sandbox
>    - Provide human interfaces as appropriate - if anyone wanted to create
>    *shiny XSLT -> XHTML *perhaps; or PHP glue...
>    - *Setup a SPARQL endpoint* (I have a hell of a time doing this in my
>    development environment, so this might not happen) - HELP!
>     - Provide unit test coverage for all generator tools
>    - Refactor lots
>
>
>
>
>
>